How do you ‘Like’?
So we’ve all learnt to like, add, share, digg, stumble, tweet, flick and tumble all of our favourite websites, haven’t we? Well, just in case you don’t have enough avenues to share your life with Google has now created their +1 button!
If you understand the concept of the Facebook ‘Like’ button then to simplify things the Google +1 button is basically a ‘Like’ button. I have added a video at the end of this post which shows you how the Google +1 works.
I totally understand that Google are trying to make their offering available to the mainstream, but I think that they are taking all the fun out of ‘surfing’ the web, let me explain.
If you don’t use Google.com as your search tool then this may not be so relevant. For a while now Google has had a web page preview button in their search results so that instead of actually clicking on a link you can just hover your mouse over the little magnifying glass icon and you will see a preview of that page with the purpose of you being able to tell from that little picture if the site is relevant to you or not. I have to admit I like this feature, when I am browsing I am more likely to go to a site that is visually appealing to me over a site that is not and has advertising all through it. I don’t think I am alone here! But this has a significant effect on your website if you are tracking the analytics and metrics of the traffic going to your site because if someone only views that thumbnail it doesn’t get recorded as a visit. So you are not finding out that critical data of how many people visited your site for a very short period of time and turned away because they didn’t like you site!
And now with the Google +1 button appearing on all search result items you area able to hover over the magnifying glass, if you don’t like the look of it totally dismiss the page or if you like the look of it you can whimsically click on the +1 button and keep looking for a better option.
Getting back to my cynical intro though, let me ask, how many different avenues of social media rhetoric do we really need? I would love to hear your thoughts on this. My personal opinion is that only a few that concentrate on certain genres such as technology, music, art, science would be ideal but unfortunately there are so many out there now and something new is happening all the time.
As a ‘web guy’ I feel that with a website design you must include all of the mainstream avenues, because so many people prefer to use their favourite means to share links. If you don’t cater for that then you are missing out on opportunities.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RyY2-ofP4g
Yours in liking, sharing, digging, stumbling, tweeting, flicking….
Paul
